What is Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)?

Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is the research field that explores the social, communicative and linguistic impact of communication technologies, which have continually evolved in connection with the use of computer networks. The main focus of CMC research is on Internet-based technologies and their genres: e-mail, mailinglists, discussion groups (forums and bulletin boards), Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and webchats, Instant Messaging (ICQ, AIM & Co.), MUDs, Voice-over-IP applications (Skype etc.), Web-based videoconferencing, weblogs and hypertext (incl. wikis).

Types and examples of CMC corpora

We differentiate the following types of CMC corpora:

project-related corpora

were compiled as an empirical basis for research questions in a particular project;

corpora for general use

do not directly pertain to a particular project, but were established rather as a data pool for the investigation of diverse potential research questions;

corpora of raw data

have been left in the condition in which they were originally acquired from the Internet;

In annotated corpora,

the data have been subjected to annotation processes (e.g. an SGML/XML-based annotation of data segments that may be relevant for purposes of analysis).